Module description
The modules offered in each academic year are subject to change in line with staff availability and student demand: there is no guarantee every module will run. Module descriptions and information may vary between years.
In 1900, Harlem was an affluent, predominantly white neighbourhood. By the 1920s, however, Harlem was home to the world’s largest black urban community, its name was widely employed as a synonym for black America, and it was even heralded as the emerging ‘race capital’ of the black world. This module explores the processes of migration, segregation and congregation through which Harlem became and remained a black community, and also reconstructs the multiple meanings Harlem acquired over the course of a century for its residents and for media, literary authors, visual artists, social scientists and others in the United States and beyond.
Beginning with the demographic transformations that remade the neighbourhood in the early twentieth century—including the influx of migrants from the Caribbean and the U.S. South—the module then considers the political and artistic ferment of the 1920s and 1930s and interrogates the notion of a ‘Harlem Renaissance.’ Subsequent topics examine the social and intellectual forces that recast the neighbourhood’s symbolic significance, as Harlem’s image as the frontier of black progress was increasingly displaced by the notion of Harlem as the archetypal American ‘ghetto.’ Processes such as deindustrialisation and the impact of public housing policy will be read in conjunction with representations of Harlem in journalism, the social sciences, fiction, poetry, film and the visual arts. Finally, the module looks to the controversies surrounding ‘gentrification’ in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Throughout, the module seeks to illuminate the significance of place in the production of racial discourse—by drawing on work by historians, cultural geographers and others—in order to understand Harlem’s enduring symbolic capital within discussions of black life in the United States and beyond.
Provisional teaching plan
- Introduction: Placing Harlem
- Making a Black Metropolis
- New Negroes
- Harlem in ‘Harlem Renaissance’ Writings
- Caribbean and African Connections
- Indignant Generation: Radicalism and Protest during the Depression and Second World War
- Urban Crisis
- The Movements: Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Arts
- Ghetto Wars: Representing Harlem from Dark Ghetto to Precious
- The ‘New Harlem’: Gentrification and Authenticity
Assessment details
1 x 3,500 words essay (100%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module aims to provide an in-depth understanding of Harlem's significance in African - American, American, and black diasporic history since the early years of the twentieth century. It brings social history into dialogue with intellectual history in order to demonstrate how Harlem's symbolic significance resulted from the interplay of social change and ideas. Traversing a time span of more than a century, the module requires students to comprehend the reasons for Harlem's emergence as the world's largest black urban community and a symbol of black achievement, as well as the neighbourhood's subsequent reinventions as America's archetypal 'ghetto' and as a site of contested 'gentrification.' Central to the educational aims of the module is analysis of the relationship between the physical and social construction of place and the production of ideas of race.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will have developed intellectual and practical skills appropriate to a Level 7 module and in particular will have gained: 1. A detailed knowledge of the social, economic and demographic forces that have shaped successive transformations of Harlem since 1900. 2. An advanced understanding of the interrelation of social and intellectual change. 3. An ability to draw connections between Harlem's history and key historiographical debates in twentieth - century African - American history and urban history. 4. An ability to draw comparisons, contrasts and connections between a large body of representations of Harlem from different disciplines and time periods, as constructed in different media. 5. An ability to assess and utilise the theoretical literature on place, and to bring key concepts from this literature to bear on the study of ideas of race. 6. An ability to engage critically with a wide array of primary source types, from journalism and social scientific writings to literature and visual artworks. 7. A capacity to formulate their own questions and deeply researched answers concerning the themes of the module, and to communicate these answers with a high level of clarity and fluency in oral and written forms.
Teaching pattern
10 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Suggested reading list
Suggested introductory reading
This is a suggested reading list and purchase of these texts is not mandatory.
Herb Boyd, ed., The Harlem Reader (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003)
Jonathan Gill, Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America (New York: Grove Press, 2011)
James de Jongh, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem in the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)
Cheryl Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?” Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Monique Taylor, Harlem Between Heaven and Hell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
Paula J. Massood, Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013)
Camilo Jose Vergara, The Unmaking of a Ghetto: Harlem, 1970-2009 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)